Play With Google’s Psychedelic New Interactive Music Video Cube

It’s called The Cube, and it’s a trip. Built by Google Creative Labs as “an experimental platform for interactive storytelling”, The Cube is an in-browser manipulateable 3-D box with a different video and audio track on each face. It debuted online today with indie dance band The Presets’ new single “No Fun”. You decide what to watch and hear by clicking and dragging The Cube to show a single side or a combination.

And no, Google didn’t take some bad acid. The whole thing is a multi-pronged promo. The Cube only runs in Google Chrome and Android, it links to buy the song on Google Play where it’s exclusively available for the next 48 hours, and it’s sure to help Google recruit designers by showing it can do art, not just algorithms.

And since The Cube is embeddable, you can play with it below. There’s a story about a girl in a bathtub and a dude dancing himself silly laced in with technicolor heads and pulsing geometric shapes.

This isn’t Google’s first foray into weird, interactive music videos. The Chrome Experiments has done two with Arcade Fire. “The Wilderness Downtown” used your address and Google Maps to customize the video with aerial shots of your home. “Just A Reflektor” employed your phone and webcam to let your movements control the action.

But rather than a one-off experiment, Google is calling The Cube a “platform”, indicating more art could be built on it eventually. It was conceived by the Google Sydney Creative Lab team and demoed last month in person at the local Semi Permanent creative conference. Google hooked up with The Presets to show what The Cube can do, but the possibilities go far beyond music.

Imagine a short film told from six different perspectives simultaneously, or using The Cube for interactive data visualizations. Groovy.

For more on the making of The Cube, check out the behind the scenes video below (you’re probably gonna want to pause The Cube itself first)